• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Silverstone FT01 build experience

B

Busterizer

n00b
Joined
Nov 25, 2008
Messages
39
I recently finished building the system in my sig and thought I'd share my experiences with the Silverstone FT01 (I got the FT01B non-windowed version). First though, let me say that I like the case overall, but it wasn't the easiest to build with.

The good stuff:

1. The build quality is exceptional, and the case looks awesome. It's solidly built, has no rattles at all, and looks awesome (imo anyway ;)).

2. It does a great job of keeping my Ultra-120 supplied with fresh cool air. At stock settings my CPU idles at ~30c and only hits the low 50s under load.

3. The case fans themselves are really quiet and move a lot of air. I can hear a quiet wooshing noise all the time, but because it's so steady I quickly forget about it even with the case sitting on the desk right next to me.

The problems I ran into:

1. Most of the reviews I read stated that the top 3.5" HDD cage was removable to improve air flow. That may be the case, but at least with mine it's very difficult to do. It's on slides of some sort, connected to the bottom cage, and it's tight enough that I'm concerned about bending the aluminum while pulling it off. So far I've left it in place, but it does block some air flow that should be getting to the video card.

2. If your motherboard has SATA ports on the front edge of the board, you don't have much room between it and the drive cages. Inserting the SATA cables was pretty difficult, and the pressure on them makes me a little nervous.

3. Hard drives mount "sideways" (ie: the cable end points to the side of the case rather than towards the back). There's not a whole lot of room between the drives and the side panel, and I had to put some work into bending the SATA power plug wires down in order to put the panel on, and I'm still unhappy with the amount of stress this seems to put on the power connector on the drives themselves.

4. Cost - this is not a cheap case. The build quality matches the price, but I do feel like a few of the spacing issues could have been fixed without sacrificing its otherwise excellent qualities.

I hope my experience will help people considering this case make a more educated decision. Despite my gripes I'm very happy with the case. I don't do a ton of hardware changing (swapping drives, etc), so the spacing issues aren't a day to day problem for me, and I'm willing to accept a little more difficulty during the initial build for such a sweet case ;)

Cheers,
-Fin
 
I agree with your impressions. I built mine (with an i7 too, hah) and I used the hot swap adapters for the hard drives. I sorta now wish that I didn't, because it makes closing the side panel difficult, and the panel bows out ever so slightly with the wires that are present on the back right now. I'll probably either remove the sound deadening or have to seriously rethink my wiring in order to fix that.

But the case is beautiful and I like it a lot. The SATA ports on my board point basically right at the hard drive cages which is not good, but what can you do. They stay in so I guess that is the important part. I sorta wish they made the case ever so slightly wider though, in order to help with the wiring problems.
 
I read somewhere that you cannot remove the dust filter for the top fan. Can anyone verify if this is true?
 
Thanks for the information. This is still my dream case, hopefully the prices drop a little bit though, $200 is a lot for a case!
 
mrmylanman said:
I agree with your impressions. I built mine (with an i7 too, hah) and I used the hot swap adapters for the hard drives. I sorta now wish that I didn't, because it makes closing the side panel difficult, and the panel bows out ever so slightly with the wires that are present on the back right now. I'll probably either remove the sound deadening or have to seriously rethink my wiring in order to fix that.

But the case is beautiful and I like it a lot. The SATA ports on my board point basically right at the hard drive cages which is not good, but what can you do. They stay in so I guess that is the important part. I sorta wish they made the case ever so slightly wider though, in order to help with the wiring problems.
Click to expand...

That's good to know about the hot-swap adapter. I didn't use the one I have, but had been considering changing to it hoping that they had made it fit properly. Now that I know it's also a tight squeeze, I probably won't bother.

My motherboard also points the SATA ports right at the drive cages. Did you pull out the top cage? If so, did it help any?

-Fin
 
No my top cage is still in. I may do that in order to help with the room issue, but it does a nice job blocking my wires from view (I have the windowed version). In a while when I upgrade my video card I will also end up sleeving my wires and work on maybe doing custom lengths and things like that. A big problem with the hot swap adapters is the power connectors are way too long for what they are and make a huge mess of wires.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top